Monday, March 29, 2004
Not actually blogging. Richard Long of 2River makes a good point in his post-CCCC post about using blogging software simply to carry out assignments that we used to do other ways:
Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I'm not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They're using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I'm not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts? #
My first semester with weblog software, as I learned the software itself, I mainly asked people to use it for trading information, drafts, and feedback -- all things we might have done other ways in the past. [The software was, by the way, very good for that.] My second semester extended that to research projects chosen by students, with other students reading the work by classmates along the way -- a not very pure imitation of a weblog with a topical focus. But still these were not quite weblogs as you would see them in the wild, and not all the students could see the opportunities the genre offered them. Those that could see it wrote the most blog-like sites. This semester I'm not using the software in classes, as I regroup.
It was a pleasure to meet Richard and other bloggers at CCCC, and his point stays with me. While the software can do several things, weblogs themselves are a more particular set of practices with their own virtues. So here is a hypothesis:
The more you recognize what you see on the web page from some other genre or some other place, the less the thing is a weblog. Or maybe: ...the less the thing is taking advantage of being a weblog. And that is all the more true of wikis, I'd say.
A next step would be to talk about what we take advantage of when we write blogs or wikis, then. We should be able to name what all the features of a blog or wiki really accomplish, then. [0 & P]
Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I'm not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They're using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I'm not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts? #
My first semester with weblog software, as I learned the software itself, I mainly asked people to use it for trading information, drafts, and feedback -- all things we might have done other ways in the past. [The software was, by the way, very good for that.] My second semester extended that to research projects chosen by students, with other students reading the work by classmates along the way -- a not very pure imitation of a weblog with a topical focus. But still these were not quite weblogs as you would see them in the wild, and not all the students could see the opportunities the genre offered them. Those that could see it wrote the most blog-like sites. This semester I'm not using the software in classes, as I regroup.
It was a pleasure to meet Richard and other bloggers at CCCC, and his point stays with me. While the software can do several things, weblogs themselves are a more particular set of practices with their own virtues. So here is a hypothesis:
The more you recognize what you see on the web page from some other genre or some other place, the less the thing is a weblog. Or maybe: ...the less the thing is taking advantage of being a weblog. And that is all the more true of wikis, I'd say.
A next step would be to talk about what we take advantage of when we write blogs or wikis, then. We should be able to name what all the features of a blog or wiki really accomplish, then. [0 & P]